Tagged: photography

The selfie has become commonplace in the last year or so, even making itself into the Oxford Dictionary as the word of the year for 2013. It has completely changed both the worlds of social media and also photography. Many members of the public now repeatedly take these ‘selfie’ photos but, as a piece of self-portraiture, are they truly an accurate representation of how the photo taker views themselves as a person?

This is where the #Bagsie exhibition comes in, a collaboration between Soapbox and Sons, Creative Advice Network, photographer Jonathan Knowles and a collection of ten different illustrators, artists and writers. #Bagsie updates the selfie and brings it more into the world of portraiture photography with a great new idea, covering each subjects head with a decorated brown paper bag.

Each participating artist illustrated their paper bag to represent the individual personality within them. The idea behind this was to create a more accurate representation of the subject than just the face value that the standard selfie would capture. It’s a really interesting thought with some of the bags produced being fantastic pieces of art in themselves that, when paired with their subjects, make for a collection of really fun images.

The #Bagsie show runs from 11th-16th November at The Proud Archivist, 2-10 Hertford Road, London N1 5ET

One of my final projects from the last year of my university degree involved me taking what is known as ‘sleeveface’ photos of my friends. This was to help make the advertising campaign for a new series of singles nights that I had created for lovers of vinyl records.

The adverts blended record sleeves with actual people, aligning them together to give the impression of one single figure. I then used song lyrics from the artists featured to link back to the idea of a singles night, as if the figure in each of them was saying this line to another attendee. The rest of the project can be found on my website here.

I’m talking about this project because today I came across the work of Malaysia-based Graphic Designer Jaemy Choong. He uses a similar technique to create images, except instead of vinyl record sleeves, he uses movie postcards. He still has the same clever mixture of physical and print, merging people together effortlessly with the figures seen on the cards. It’s a really fun process and its great to see the two elements working together so well. Here are a few of my favourites:

Full credit to him for getting them aligned so perfectly, I know from experience just how difficult it can be to get it to work. You can see more of these pictures on his Instagram here.

One of my favourite artists is Banksy and one of my favourite toys when growing up was LEGO, so you can imagine my excitement when I found this. Canadian photographer Jeff Friesen has created a series of photos that merge these two elements, recreating some of Banksy’s most famous pieces in LEGO brick form.

Friesen has then played on LEGO’s values of imagination and creativity, visualising what the wider context of the piece is by placing it within a larger LEGO environment.

This great design series by Flickr user Harvezt has been making the rounds on social media lately, with a number of design sites talking about it. In each piece, Harvezt takes a popular album cover and visualises what that scene would look like from behind.

This series of images shares slight parallels with another one I recently found by none other than the Guardian newspaper. In it, various famous album covers are inserted into Google street view shots of where the albums cover imagery was originally taken.

Some really interesting examples of how album artwork of the past can be reimagined for the future.

First off, excuse the horrific attempt at a pun with this post’s title, it was just something that jumped to mind and I couldn’t shake it! Anyway, as I now come towards the end of my second semester of third year and the business end of my degree at Falmouth, I’m beginning to spend more and more time looking at the work of design agencies, to help identify ones that I might want to send my portfolio to in the hopes of getting a placement.

On a recent browse of work, one of the pieces that immediately jumped out at me was The Allotment‘s redesign of the Adoption Scheme for The Donkey Sanctuary. Taking what was a simple piece of editorial design and turning it into something much more emotive and considered, the scheme was given a core concept that clearly set it apart from other competitor products. The big idea was ‘A Lifetime of Memories’, making the donkeys the hero of the product and bringing them into the heart of your family.

Each donkey was professionally photographed, with the adoption pack designed to look like a picture frame in which all the supporting material sat. This allowed it to be its own point of sale pack, immediately intriguing and enticing viewers. Other elements of the redesigned scheme, such as the supporting material and an app which allows you to add donkeys to your own photos were all equally beautifully crafted, but for me it is the frame pack that is the star of the show.

Not only is it really well crafted with great attention to detail, but it is just so unique in its design and the idea behind it. The use of the picture frame really emphasises the ‘part of the family’ concept, putting it a million miles away from the generic design of the sanctuary’s previous adoption pack. Its difference grabs your attention instantly and holds it throughout all aspects of the scheme and pack. It also allows it to sit rather nicely amongst your family photos!

In my opinion it really is a fantastic piece of design and this thought is obviously shared by others as it recently won best product launch at the Marketing Design Awards. For more information on the adoption pack, visit The Allotment’s website here, or watch the below video.

For a studio that have only been around for four years, The Allotment have really become a force in the design world, placing 9th in Design Week’s Creative Survey in 2012, above huge agencies like Pentagram and Johnson Banks. They have become one of my favourite design studios whose work and process really inspires me in my own. When I come to applying for placements in a few weeks time, I’ll definitely be sending The Allotment a copy of my portfolio. Here’s hoping I get a positive response.

You may have noticed that I have been somewhat neglecting this blog recently, with no new posts for the last couple of weeks. Now, this isn’t because I haven’t wanted to post anything (I’ve got tons of bookmarked work that I want to talk about), it’s because I just unfortunately haven’t had the time.

When I started this blog I set myself the perhaps somewhat daunting task of one post per day. Despite this, I managed to succeed for the most part, sticking to the rule for a number of months. In retrospect, this may not have been the best decision, as once the second year of my uni course was up and running I found myself wanting to put more and more time into the work for it because, unlike last year, this one actually counts towards my degree. Because of this, the one post per day rule sort of went out the window!

Now, don’t sit there thinking that this means your favourite blog in all of the world is no more! What this just means is that from now on the blog will be much more sporadic in posts, with me only posting when I can, which I will try my best to make as often as possible. I will endeavour to create some sort of less constrained post schedule in the future, but unfortunately with everything that’s going on, I can’t make any promises.

There is a lot of things you can do with bubble wrap; protect presents, packing things, or you can just have fun popping it. But I don’t suppose you’d ever thought of creating typography with it had you? Lo Siento have though, as they’ve done just that, creating bubble wrap typography for the cover of Japanese magazine +81.